Friday, November 30, 2012

HE'S A SYMBOL, AND THE SYMBOL LIVES ON:  Fantastic interview with director Christopher Nolan in Film Comment on the completion of his Batman trilogy. A taste:
With my co-writers David Goyer and my brother [Jonathan Nolan], we decided early on that the greatest villains in movies, the people who most get under our skin, are the people who speak the truth. So with Ra’s Al Ghul, we wanted everything he said to be true in some way. So, he’s looking at the world from a very honest perspective that he truly believes. And we applied the same thing to The Joker and Bane in the third one. Everything they say is sincere. And in terms of their ideology, it’s really about ends justifying means.... I think truly threatening villains are the ones who have a coherent ideology behind what they’re saying. The challenge in applying that to The Joker was to have part of the ideology be anarchic and a lack of ideology in a sense. But it’s a very specific, laid-out lack of ideology, so it becomes, paradoxically, an ideology in itself.

2 comments:

  1. It'll be interesting to see if a) the rumors of Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing Batman in Justice League are true and b) if they are, if he's playing Bruce Wayne as Batman or if he's playing Robini John Blake as Batman.

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  2. isaac_spaceman6:45 PM

    Gonna get my geek on here and point out that, at least back in the 1978-1982 period when I was reading comic books, Justice League was such an inferior analogue to the Avengers -- such a dumbed-down group of kid-friendly goody-goodies -- that JGL seems more right than Christian Bale in that movie. Justice League was way more Joel Silver Batman-and-Robin than Frank Miller Batman. It was like TNBC in colorful tights. You pretty much have to adopt a different tonal palette for Batman if you're going to fit him in with Superman and Wonder Woman.

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